


The Road Towards Kamakura (the fishing boat adrift remix)

by Quillori



Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Space Opera
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 08:37:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20485988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/pseuds/Quillori
Summary: Mamoru looks back.Based on a really wonderful space opera AU (read the whole excellent serieshere), which combines the Takatori family with the founding of the Kamakura shogunate, butin space.





	The Road Towards Kamakura (the fishing boat adrift remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Daegaer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daegaer/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Road Towards Kamakura](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3204533) by [Daegaer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daegaer/pseuds/Daegaer). 

It is never really warm enough here. I don’t know why - I’ve told them to check the heating. It’s the fashion now to tame nature, to make a garden of some innocent study or reception room, and not even a proper garden, but something wild, at least in appearance, as though it were uncivilised jungle . So they tell me, anyway, and it suits me well enough, although I still think it looks a little ridiculous, curling vines and huge, fleshy flowers cascading over cabinets, tables peeking through foliage like glimpses of hidden treasure, lacking any sense of proportion. But it does need to be kept hot.

It’strange - I used not to like the heat. The air would almost shimmer, and yet it filled your lungs like a heavy weight, pressing you down so you could hardly walk, the sun glaring. That was back on Alcmene. I haven’t thought of it for years now, but if I close my eyes I can still see it all, almost feel it. Almost. You can never quite recall what it feels like to be too hot when you’re cold. But I can wrap my hands around a cup of coffee (they make it specially for me - no one else here has a taste for it) and almost remember.

There was a tray, local ware - an even blue, rather too bright, with a simple pattern of coloured lozenges around the edge. There was a matching pattern on the glasses. I don’t think I noticed it then, but I remember that tray did have matching glasses. The water was cold and good, and Claudine was there. She smiled at me, I think, shyly, though she wasn’t Claudine then, wasn’t anyone, just a name, a new face, less important than the water.

I wanted to make a good impression, I think, although by the time I got to the embassy I mostly just wanted to be somewhere cool and dark, and not have to greet so many new people.

I wonder what happened to them all? There are so many people I’ve lost track of, so many faces that have vanished into the past. What about Ishikawa? Did he ever find someone suitable plump and compliant? Several someones? Perhaps he ended up with a whole brood of fat little children rolling around his feet, all with that misleadingly serious look to their faces.

I wonder how many family portraits I’ve sat for myself? They’re useful, of course, good propaganda. But a picture’s not really real, not really true, even if it isn’t a lie either. There was some commemorative book, or perhaps a documentary - they’d found a photo of me with Claudine, leaving the hospital after a check-up. We were smiling, my arm around her shoulder. No lie there - I was happy to have my first child, happy when it was a boy, and I always liked Claudine. But it wasn’t the truth either. I can still taste how angry I was as we left the hospital, putting on a show for the press. How dare anyone think it wasn’t her choice, that I’d forced her? It was unbearable that anyone dare plot to take the child away, that anyone should try to take _anything_ more from me.

There’s another portrait, rather later, all of us together, the new beginning of the Takatoris, Nagi standing beside me, the boys smiling up at the camera. A happy, united family, with no dissension or disagreements.

There was a film I saw the other day. I don’t remember the plot (I slept through most of it, to be honest), but there was a girl who followed her husband into exile. I think they filmed every stretch of desolate beach they could find in the entire Empire. No wonder I fell asleep. But I think it was supposed to be a tragedy, or perhaps just a romantic tearjerker - her husband didn’t love her, for all her loyalty and sacrifice. Or perhaps I’m mixing it up with a different film, and this was the one where she had a sister who became her rival. They all start to blur together after a while.

Nagi always liked ridiculous stories like that. I never paid attention to the plots when I was watching them with him. Well, we had better things to do.

My little Hirofumi preferred war movies: the gay, dashing sort with brave heroes and dastardly villains. Everyone dies quickly in films like that, if they die at all. No one ever screams until they're too hoarse to cry, or dies by inches in agony and degradation at the hand of a state torturer. If a city burns, it’s clean, even pretty, shot from high above so the flames and the smoke create a pattern, and the cinematographer is praised afterwards for his skill and taste. You can’t smell the burning flesh, or hear people crying. All you hear is pretty speeches about revenge and honour.

But you know, when I made those speeches myself, I think I meant them. I remember meaning them. And I wasn’t looking down on an artful scene of destruction, totally out of human scale. I was thinking of my friends - this was back on Alcmene, when I had friends, friends didn’t want anything from me, weren’t looking for advancement or protection, or no more than anyone does, but just liked me. I was thinking of an old man, covering his great-granddaughter’s eyes, telling her it would be alright, as the soldiers lifted their guns. Of Nagi telling me it would be better if Claudine killed herself rather than let herself be caught. I was thinking about fear, and death, and real, individual people dying, their lives snuffed out, ended, and those people my enemies, who deserved to die.

Friends are a strange thing. How many years is it since I thought of Ken? And yet we were friends once, for a while, and he tried to stand by me, offer me a home to come back to. Would we have anything to say to each other, if we met again now? Or Nagi’s friends. They were his friends, he would have argued with you if you said they weren’t, and perhaps they loved him in their way, but Schuldig would hurt him for the fun of it, and they both used him, and me, and everyone else they ever met.

I wonder sometimes. I blamed myself for great-grandfather’s death, and my niece. My life falls, still, into two neat parts, before and after. And you’d think it would be before and after I met Nagi, or before and after I was caught up from my flower shop and acknowledged, or before and after the family fell. Even before and after we won, or before and after I thought there might be a happy ending. But no, if I’m being honest, and I might as well be honest at least with myself: it’s before I saw the video, saw them die. And I’d thought he’d been dead for years, but even so…

If I hadn’t had children, arranged a marriage, tried to preserve a family that accepted me only as it was destroyed… If I hadn’t made myself seem a threat, not just a cruel joke, the bastard child in exile to show how low the family had fallen. If I hadn’t done any of that, surely she at least might have survived? I blamed myself for a long time. It was easier that way.

But I sent them away, Crawford and Schuldig, refused to do what they wanted, refused to be their champion them when they wanted freedom as well as power. And then the one thing happened that perfectly changed my mind, set me on the course they wanted. They said, when they were trying to persuade me, that they had connections, favours owed, influence. And Nagi tried to comfort me, to tell me that whatever influence they had, they wouldn’t use it for spite, just to hurt us, no matter what they threatened. But use it to get their own way? Such a simple thing, to get a traitor killed, and a girl who might bear children. It would hardly be a favour at all. And now here we are, and here they are, and if someone gets their way in all things, is it wise to assume it’s accidental?

But I said I should be honest with myself, and doesn't that go for me too? I too had what I wanted. I had my revenge, and my family triumphant, and if I’d truly preferred to stay an ambassador to an out-of-the-way corner, I could have done so. I meant at the time not to use people as things, I'm sure of it, and I truly was sick when I saw that film, when I saw them die. But surely I have had my way, where it counted most - there is a price to be paid for anything worth having, and presumably the things I was prepared to sacrifice were not the things I most wanted to have. (I remember Nagi leaving, going to raise support for our cause, and how sickly certain I was I'd never see him again. Even now I remember my grief, my fear, the thought of an empty lifetime without him. I can still taste, a lifetime later, the relief when he came back, when he was safely in my arms. But I let him leave all the same.) And now, at the end, knowing how it all turned out? If some member of the Psy-Corps came to me with a new and unheard of power, said they were able to change some detail of the past, would I save two people and strand myself for a lifetime on Alcmene?

I remember how great-grandfather faced his execution calmly. All the things he’d done, and been responsible for, and surrounded by his own failure, with no way of knowing his family survived and would conquer… When we are young, everything burns so brightly, love and enmity and principle and honour, but even the hottest fires die down to ashes. And surveyed coldly, without passion, have things not worked well as they are?


End file.
